Classics Books

Book SynopsisRevisit one of the great adventure novels and classics of animal literature—now with a foreword by E.L. Doctorow One of the greatest American storytellers, Jack London enjoyed phenomenal popularity in his own time and remains widely read throughout the world. His work is characterized by thrilling action, an intuitive feeling for animal life, and a sense of justice that often manifests itself through violence. The Call of the Wild, perhaps the best novel ever written about animals, traces a dog’s sudden entry into the wild and his education in survival among the wolves. Library of America Paperback Classics feature authoritative texts drawn from the acclaimed Library of America series and introduced by today’s most distinguished scholars and writers. Each book features a detailed chronology of the author’s life and career, and essay on the choice of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Jack London: Novels and Stories, volume number 6 in The Library of America series. It is joined in the series by a companion volume, number 7, Jack London: Novels and Social Writings.

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Book Synopsis"The Red Badge of Courage is the definitive fiction of the conflict that stands as the central trauma in American history." -- Larzer Ziff Before his untimely death at the age of 28, Stephen Crane produced the most innovative writing of his generation. Begun when he was just 21, The Red Badge of Courage is the powerful story of a young Union soldier under fire for the first time. It remains our greatest novel of the Civil War, and a major contribution to the literature of war in English. With its publication, American fiction entered the modern age. For almost thirty years, The Library of America has presented America''s best and most significant writing in acclaimed hardcover editions. Now, a new series, Library of America Paperback Classics, offers attractive and affordable books that bring The Library of America''s authoritative texts within easy reach of every reader. Each book features an introductory essay by one of a leading writer, as well as a detailed chronology of the author''s life and career, an essay on the choice and history of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Stephen Crane: Prose and Poetry, volume number 18 in the Library of America series. That volume also includes Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, George''s Mother, The Third Violet, The Monster, war correspondence and journalism, and collected and uncollected poetry.

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Book Synopsis"The most powerful and enduring work of art ever written about American slavery." -Alfred Kazin When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe in 1862, he greeted her as "the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war." He was exaggerating only slightly. First published in 1852, Uncle Tom''s Cabin sold more than 300,000 copies in its first year and brought home the evils of slavery more dramatically than any abolitionist tract possibly could. With its boldly drawn characters, violent reversals of fortune, and unabashed sentimentality, Stowe''s work remains one of the great polemical novels of American literature, a book with the emotional impact of a round of cannon fire. For almost thirty years, The Library of America has presented America''s best and most significant writing in acclaimed hardcover editions. Now, a new series, Library of America Paperback Classics, offers attractive and affordable books that bring The Library of America''s authoritative texts within easy reach of every reader. Each book features an introductory essay by one of a leading writer, as well as a detailed chronology of the author''s life and career, an essay on the choice and history of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Harriet Beecher Stowe: Three Novels, volume number 4 in The Library of America series. That volume also includes The Minister''s Wooing and Oldtown Folks.

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Book Synopsis"Mark Twain is the true father of all American literature." -Eugene O''Neill Mark Twain is perhaps the most widely read and enjoyed of all our national writers. Tom Sawyer, according to Twain, "is simply a hymn put into prose form to give it a worldly air," a book in which nostalgia is so strong that it dissolves the tensions and perplexities that assert themselves in the later works. It is filled with comic and melodramatic adventure, with horseplay and poetic evocations of scenery, and with characters who have become central to American mythology. For almost thirty years, The Library of America has presented America''s best and most significant writing in acclaimed hardcover editions. Now, a new series, Library of America Paperback Classics, offers attractive and affordable books that bring The Library of America''s authoritative texts within easy reach of every reader. Each book features an introductory essay by one of a leading writer, as well as a detailed chronology of the author''s life and career, an essay on the choice and history of the text, and notes. The contents of this Paperback Classic are drawn from Mark Twain: Mississippi Writings, volume number 5 in the Library of America series. It is joined in the series by six companion volumes, gathering the collected works of Mark Twain.

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Book SynopsisNearly thirty years in the making, The Library of America's eleven-volume edition of the complete fiction of Henry James now culminates with this authoritative volume collecting his final three finished works. Considered by James to be his most finely constructed novel, The Ambassadors (1903) recounts the attempts of a conscientious American to convince the son of a friend to return home from Paris-and in doing so plays the charm of the Old World against the provincialism of the New. In The Golden Bowl (1904), an American woman marries an Italian prince while her father unknowingly marries the prince's former mistress; James underscores both the fragility and strength of human ties and further develops what he once called the "complex fate, being an American." Originally written for the stage but never produced, James reworked The Outcry (1911) into a highly successful comic novel of social manners that also deals with the ethics of art collecting. Included as an appendix is "The Married Son," the chapter James contributed to The Whole Family (1908), a multi-author novel conceived by William Dean Howells and portraying a dysfunctional family whose struggles mirror the frustrated collaborative efforts of the book's twelve contributors.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisFirst published anonymously in 1912, The Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man has electrified readers ever since with its stark portrayal of the color line in America and its daring modernist style. Now The Library of America presents an annotated centennial edition, introduced by National Book Award Winner Charles R. Johnson (Middle Passage).

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Book SynopsisOriginally published from 1932 to 1943, Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House books are classics of children’s literature, beloved by millions. But readers who last enjoyed them as children may be astonished at the quiet poetry of Wilder’s prose and the force and poignancy of her portrait of the lives of American pioneers. Now The Library of America and editor Caroline Fraser present a new two-volume edition that affirms Wilder’s place in the American canon, reintroducing these enduring works to readers young and old. Here, for the first time in two collectible hardcover volumes, are all eight Little House novels—brilliant narratives of the early life of Laura Ingalls and her family as they grow up with the country in the woods, on the plains, and finally in the small towns of the advancing American frontier—plus the posthumous novella The First Four Years, which recounts the early years of the author’s marriage to Almanzo Wilder. This second volume includes By the Shores of Silver Lake, The Long Winter, Little Town on the Prairie, These Happy Golden Years, and The First Four Years, plus two rare autobiographical pieces that reveal real life events not included in the novels and address the inevitable question: what happened next?A companion volume gathers Little House in the Big Woods, Farmer Boy, Little House on the Prairie,and On the Banks of Plum Creek.Each volume features a newly-researched chronology of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s life and career, and helpful notes. The volumes are also available in a deluxe collector’s boxed set, The Little House Books: The Library of America Collection.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisThe most comprehensive edition ever published of Mark Twain's short writings

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Book SynopsisAn anthology of fiction from the American novelist, poet, farmer and activist features the entire tale of the fictional small Kentucky town of Port William in chronological order spanning from 1864 to 1945 and encompassing 23 stories and four novels.

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Book SynopsisLibrary of America presents a definitive collection of classic Westerns by America''s master modern crime writer One of the great storytellers of our time, Elmore Leonard perfected his craft writing Westerns, a genre he loved. These tales--some adapted into such outstanding films as Hombre, Valdez Is Coming, and 3:10 to Yuma--are unexcelled for their wiry tautness, sharp characterizations, and jolts of unexpected humor. For sheer stripped-down narrative tension Leonard never did anything better, and the fresh twists he finds in resolving the genre''s classic confrontations reveal a master at work. Whether describing a Civil War veteran coming back to find his homestead stolen (Last Stand at Saber River), a man raised by Apaches treated with contempt by the white settlers who will ultimately depend on him for their survival (Hombre), a local constable, tricked into killing an innocent man, fighting back against the powerful man who duped him (Valdez Is Coming), or two convicts in a desert prison--one African American and the other half-Apache--plotting a near-impossible escape (Forty Lashes Less One), Leonard''s westerns are tough, suspenseful, convincing, and beautifully spare in style.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

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Book SynopsisThe American Revolution comes to vivid life in two dramatic tales of espionage, intrigue, and romance from the author of The Last of Mohicans.

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Book SynopsisRediscover the Pulitzer Prize-winning novels of a classic American writer on the 150th anniversary of his birth.

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Book SynopsisLibrary of America launches its long-awaited Hemingway edition with a landmark collection of writings from his breakthrough years, in newly edited, authoritative texts.With a letter of introduction from Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway travelled to Paris in 1921. There, he ame into contact with Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, James Joyce, and other expatriate writers and artists integral to his rapid development as a writer. This volume brings together work from the extraordinary period of 1918 to 1926, in which Hemingway's famous prose style became fully formed. It includes his work for the Toronto Star and Hearst's International News Service, the indelible stories of In Our Time (1925), The Torrents of Spring (1925), and his masterpiece, The Sun Also Rises (1926).Edited by Hemingway scholar Robert W. Trogdon, this volume features newly edited, corrected texts of In Our Time, The Torrents of Spring and The Sun Also Rises, fixing errors and restoring Hemingway’s original punctuation. It presents the 1924 edition of in our time issued by Three Mountains Press as a modernist masterpiece in its own right, apart from the subsequent versions published by Boni & Liveright and Scribners. It includes the story “Up in Michigan,” one of only a few stories dating from the period before 1923 that was not lost in Hemingway’s suitcase in the Gare de Lyon and that was originally intended as the opening story of In Our Time, and the hard-to-find, previously uncollected story “A Divine Gesture.” Also here are a selection of Hemingway’s letters from the period, which cast light on his breakthrough years and at the extraordinary international modernist moment of which he was a crucial part.

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Book SynopsisFour classic novels of psychologically-driven horror from the author of The Haunting of Hill House include her 1948 debut tale of the secrets lurking beneath suburbia to the 1958 story of a mourning family convinced the world is ending .

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Book SynopsisOne of Ours is Willa Cather''s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the making of an American soldier. Claude Wheeler, the sensitive but aspiring protagonist, has ready access to his family''s fortune but refuses to settle for it. Alienated from his uncaring father and pious mother, and rejected by a wife whose only love is missionary work, Claude is an idealist without ideals to cling to. Only when his country enters the Great War does he find the meaning of his life. In One of Ours, Willa Cather explores the life of a young Nebraskan whose ambitions drive him to a frontier wilder and more violent than the one tamed by his pioneer ancestors. Newly designed and typeset in a modern 6-by-9-inch format by Waking Lion Press.

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